Alumni Profiles

Hooked on the Fiber Arts A knitting blog is transformed into a successful online venture By Beth Potier

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Like so many web entrepreneurs before them, Casey '00 and Jessica Marshall Forbes '00 launched their online venture from their apartment. They tapped their personal savings. The company mascot was their dog.

Two years later, Ravelry.com is the most popular online social networking site you've never heard of—unless you knit or crochet, spin, dye or tend a flock of sheep. If you dabble in fiber arts, you may be one of the 270,000 "Ravelers" who have embraced Ravelry as an online meeting place, library and organizing tool. "The level of engagement with Ravelry has been really awesome," says Jessica. "There are still more people signing up than we can handle."

Indeed, if you're not on Ravelry yet, get in line. To prevent the site's booming popularity from overwhelming its technical capacity, the founders "invite" 1,500 new Ravelers daily from a waiting list. The site's success has let Jessica and Casey quit their day jobs, pay off their debts, hire two employees and move the operation (and Ravelry poster dog, Bob) from their Boston apartment to an office in Cambridge.

As a social networking platform, Ravelry lets crafters post profiles, "friend" each other, and peek into each others' knitting baskets. Ravelers can join groups—there are currently more than 9,000 of them—to connect to others who share their geography, crafting interests or other passions, from Dr. Who to dachshunds. And yes, there's a "UNH Knitters" group; Casey and Jessica, who met their freshman year in Devine Hall, are members. Ravelry is also a source of information and inspiration, posting tens of thousands of patterns from popular books and magazines as well as independent designers.

Commissions on sales of those books make up a small part of Ravelry's budget; larger shares come from the sale of Ravelry merchandise and advertising. Their advertising sales plan speaks to the couple's vision for Ravelry as a community: they keep rates low and sell only to purveyors of craft-related product or services. "We could make four times what we're making on ads if we sold space to the highest bidder, but we'd lose the knitting-related ads," says Casey. The site is and will always be free for users, the founders insist, but that hasn't stopped members from contributing to this for-profit venture. "The community was our investor at the start," says Jessica. In fact, a member-initiated "Ravelraiser" brought in $71,000 in donations, eliminating Ravelry's startup debt.

Ravelry was spun from blogging. After Jessica taught herself to knit in 2004 and launched her own blog, Casey (still a nonknitter) watched her connect with her knitting blog friends and search blogs for information. "I thought that maybe there was a way to share their work that was more fun and useful," he says. By early 2007, with Casey coding during after-work hours, Ravelry began to come alive. The couple sought feedback from Jess's online knitting friends. "A month into this, we started to realize it might be a big thing," says Casey. He attributes the site's success to the boom in knitting coinciding with the widespread adoption of Web 2.0-style engagement.

Driven by word-of-mouth, Ravelry's growth has astounded and sometimes challenged the founders, who strive to make the site by the knitting and crocheting community as well as for it. The staff "talks" on the site regularly, posting about 100 messages a day and trawling for ideas to improve the site. "We have a 10-year to-do list," says Jessica. Adds Casey, "We don't see an end in sight. Ravelry is really fulfilling work."